Like many moms, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan has had a difficult time clocking in enough sleep hours.
“Being a mom is hard…” Zuckerberg acknowledges. “She’ll wake up and check the time on her phone to see if the kids might wake up soon, but then knowing the time stresses her out and she can’t fall back asleep.”
Phone alarms, as you might know, can be a rude awakening and just add to the stress, so the Facebook cofounder designed a wooden “sleep box” that softly nudges his wife to get up without her having to check her smartphone.
The wooden box, which now sits on her bedside table, emits a subtle light from its base for an hour—between 6am and 7am—so his wife will know it’s time to wake up and get her kids ready for the day.
The device doesn’t display time, taking away that sense of emergency you feel when you awake just a mere minutes before your alarm sounds. When Zuckerberg’s wife gets up in the middle of the night and sees that the box isn’t illuminated, she’ll know that she can catch her forty winks “without having to worry about what time it is,” he adds.
“So far this has worked better than I expected and she can now sleep through the night,” says a relieved Zuckerberg.
“As an engineer, building a device to help my partner sleep better is one of the best ways I can think of to express my love and gratitude,” he adds.
Since the personal project has proven successful, Zuckerberg says he’s sharing the idea in case enterprising minds would like to pick it up.
“A bunch of my friends have told me they’d want something like this, so I’m putting this out there in case another entrepreneur wants to run with this and build sleep boxes for more people!”
Insomniacs, could this be the product you’ve been looking for?
[via Dezeen, images via various sources] http://www.designtaxi.com/news/406400/Mark-Zuckerberg-Designs-Sleep-Box-For-Wife-To-Help-Her-Catch-Peaceful-Z-s/